Smitten as a kid

Dinosaurs are an easy idol for lots of kids, and I certainly wasn’t any exception. When I was four years old, my parents took me to see The Land Before Time. This is long enough ago that it was in the theaters. I remember being wholly captivated by the animated T-Rex chasing the gang of quick witted young jurassic era reptiles. After the film was over, I got to open my birthday present – a toy dinosaur. It might have been a stegosaurus. I don’t exactly remember, but I will NEVER forget the feeling of holding that rubbery skinned likeness in my hands.

Taking that toy out of the package brought the experience to life, almost as if Spike had crawled out of the movie screen and into my arms. I had just fallen in love with dinosaurs in the theater, now I was holding one. It was tactile, physical, real.

Now, thirty four years later, I find myself chasing that feeling again. Like an addict trying to relive that first high (now that I think of it this very well may be connected to my past addictions… but I digress), collecting dinosaur fossils gives the same tangible sense of reality that doesn’t exist when reading or watching a piece of video content. Each fossil represents an animal or even an entire species of animals that people all over the world wish desperately that they could reach out and touch. For that reason, these bits and pieces of ancient creatures are priceless to me.

But, Why Turn The Collection Into A Website?

Believe it or not, I didn’t make this site to share my fossil collection with anyone. I consider this to be a project of pure self fulfillment. I feel confident that this site has no appeal to people in general, and it will likely get no visitors. That’s why it’s a pretty basic place, and doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles.

I dreamed up the site as a way to help display my physical collection better. You see, each fossil in the attached photo gallery has an info card next to it. The problem is that these cards aren’t entirely useful, and they limit how much light can pass through each glass shelf. In the cabinet image, you’ll see that the lower shelves are much darker than the higher ones. So it seemed like a good idea to ditch the cards, and replace them with a small QR code that would bring a potential viewer to a web page with more pertinent details. That’s when I got excited about doing this. I thought, “wow, I could even include videos, and pictures of each fossil, with details about the animal.” It was fun to brainstorm. However, I quickly scrapped the idea. As I said before, I don’t think there will be any kind of demand for the content I am putting on this website. When I show people my collection, I usually get a satisfyingly excited, “Oh wow! That’s incredible.” This is followed by people just wanting to know how expensive they are.

Ultimately, I decided to make this site primarily for myself. And I’m really glad that I did. Creating each post for each animal has given me another way to experience them. More than watching a movie or holding a fossil, creating blog posts has allowed me to profile each creature in a personal way that makes it feel like they belong to me. So if you find yourself here, looking at fossils, and enjoying yourself, then you and I have that in common. I hope you have also gotten to enjoy the physical collection that I have in my possession.